Humans have thought about their own curiosity for thousands of years, dating back at least to Aristotle in 350 BCE [1]}. The study of human curiosity remains an active area of research with many diverse interpretations; recent psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical accounts by [2]} and [3]} review some of this diversity of thought. Over the last three decades, curiosity has started to also catch the focused attention of researchers seeking to create increasingly intelligent non-human machines. Select ideas from the study of human curiosity inspired fantastic breakthroughs in machine intelligence, from a robot dog shifting its own learning focus across progressively more difficult situations [4]}
to a simulated agent achieving higher-than-ever-before scores in Montezuma's Revenge, one of the so-called “hard exploration” games in the Atari suite ([5]}; [6]}; [7]}; [8]}). Work on machine curiosity is expected to continue to play an influential role in machine intelligence research. Advancing curiosity in the domain of machine intelligence is also expected to have substantial reciprocal benefits for research domains focused on human and animal curiosity, like those in psychology, education, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioural economics.Advances in machine intelligence have long supported the development of new theories of biological intelligence ([9]}; [10]}). We propose that the understanding of curiosity, as a facet of intelligence, can be similarly bolstered through the development of models of curiosity for machine intelligence. Given curiosity's political role “equip[ping] us to pursue a more intellectually vibrant and equitable world” (p. xi–xii), scholars like [11]} have emphasized the urgency of transdisciplinary conversation on curiosity.
